'i just heard myself'

i went up to Beacon this weekend to see my oldest friend E. she took part in an open studios event and i thought it'd be lovely to see her. off i went with 3 peeps in Hubie2 Saturday morning.

i wont bore you with details about the day other than that we saw some lovely art, went to a vineyard, and crashed a house party.

what i came away with, (you knew this was coming!) was a realization about what dear E means to me and why i've always felt such a strong attachment to her.

picture it: we met when i was all of 8/9 years old. she was my 15/16 year old teacher in Saturday morning German language school. (my mother wanted me to learn the language since i'm Swiss.) she was smart yet chill, completely charming yet humble, one of the most approachable and accepting people i've ever met and to top it off...she's a halfie. she was my first halfie role model. you may not ever think of this, or maybe you do, but it's not often that i'm face to face with someone who looks like me.

whether you recognize it as important or not, i never realized that very fact until i attended a Loving Day event a few years ago and was in a room full of halfies. i daresay most of the others in that room probably felt the same as i did. it was neither a feeling of woe and isolation nor one of happiness, rather it was a feeling of shared experience and solidarity. as you know, i have some of the very best friends in the world but i believe even they would have a hard time comprehending the feeling of awe i felt in that room simply because it's not likely something they've ever encountered. and it's not something i'd expect from them as non-mixed people. why would i? would i say i comprehend the black experience to my black friends? no. it's one of the few things in life one has to be to understand.

so it was this past Saturday I fully recognized my connection with E and why I've always held her friendship so close to my heart. i saw her almost every Saturday for 5 years and to be as young as i was and see a well-adjusted, unaffected, and brilliant biracial, i think, really had an effect on me. as i've said before, being biracial is only a part of who i am and i'd never want it to be more than that but it's an important part nonetheless. there was so much that didn't need to be spoken. we just understood each other. at one point on Saturday she said, 'it was like i just heard myself' while she listened to me rant about my Loving Day experience. precisely, how i've felt in her presence my whole life.

i know i have friends who don't see me as biracial and i honestly love that they're colorblind to it. but it's something i've always been aware of. in my impressionable years, it wasn't something that conjured a feeling of pride. i had been on the receiving end of one too many racially charged comments. i knew people didn't accept my mother because she had a kid with a non-Chinese and out of wedlock nonetheless. gasp! undoubtedly some of it was also self-imposed. was it why my dad left? and where were the role models who could've showed me otherwise? so you see, all this internal and external loathing made an indelible mark.

the silver lining is, as i became more confident and self-assured, i came to recognize my difference as uniqueness. it didn't automatically make me less and just because i didn't see many people around who looked like me (and by extension, felt as i did) didn't make me less worthy, less loved or less worthy of being loved and i needed to stop looking at myself that way.

so, dear E, please know that in the 20 years i've had the pleasure of your acquaintance you've unwittingly become my main halfie role model in all realms of life. i know you're so much more than being someone of mixed race but that part of who you are has been important to me. thank you for showing me tolerance and acceptance.

p.s. apologies for not retaining a lick of German! :)

What are you?

So I went to this photo exhibit opening last night:

3/10/2008 - 5/30/2008
Solo Exhibition - Part Asian, 100% Hapa (Opening Reception 3/10, 6-8:00 PM) -
Asian/Pacific/American Institute, NYU
212.992.9651
www.seaweedproductions.com

The interest is obvious for me as someone who's half Chinese and half Swiss. But what I did not anticipate was the strange feeling of walking into a room and seeing people that look just like me. I realized at that point that it was something I'd never really felt before. I mean, it can be a hard concept to grasp conceptually. It never occurred to me that this was something that I'd never experienced. After all, while lots of people are ethnically mixed up there aren't very many places where they congregate. It's not like, if you're Chinese and just moved to NY from Hong Kong and you're feeling a little homesick you can head down to Chinatown for a bit of 'home.' Know what I mean? I know I repeated myself over and over to the people I was with and I know they were saying the same, "I've never really been in a room with people that look like me." We kept looking around, mouths slightly ajar, taking it all in. I couldn't stop looking around. People all looked so different yet similar. Some of the pieces on display(all of which had short blurbs written by the subjects about themselves) caused me to laugh out loud. If you haven't seen this exhibit or the book I'd recommend it because there certainly isn't much media out there about being mixed. Not that it's so much different from other ethnic 'experiences,' but it's still another perspective.

It was refreshing to joke about the "What are you?" question all of us mixed folk seem to get. Until that point, I'd never really encounter groups of other people who were the targets of that very same question I personally get on a regular basis. So to counter the joke it just became the first thing we discovered about each other with each new person we met. I dunno, it was an interesting bit of time. I'm sure most people take it for granted to look out into a sea of people and see lots of physical similarities but now I know that I've never really had that but I never noticed it until I did have it. It's not some 'boo hoo' thing at all, I like looking different, being different, being hard to pinpoint/label. It's an observation that I wanted to share because it blew my mind a bit. Ain't no lie...